Infants and toddlers in foster care face far greater risks to their healthy development and future well being than older children in foster care and even babies living in poverty.

The Yavapai Regional Partnership Council will fund a nurse home visitation program for infants and toddlers in foster care to address the complicated and serious physical, mental health and developmental problems experienced by young children in foster care. Funding will also support a Court Team...

DHS received serious complaints of abuse and neglect involving foster children in its care but failed to disclose the complaints to judges handling their child welfare cases, according to documents filed in an ongoing Tulsa federal lawsuit.

In one 2007 case, a boy told an Oklahoma Department of Human Services worker that his foster mother whipped him with a pink leather belt. The worker made a confirmed finding of abuse. "Nevertheless, DHS made no mention of this abuse" in its next report to the judge assigned to the boy's child welfare case.

For two decades, prosecutors have represented Santa Clara County children in foster care - an unusual arrangement praised for providing robust resources, but criticized for fitting poorly with a system designed to be more problem-solving than punitive.

In the wake of intense scrutiny, including a Mercury News series earlier this year, state and local officials are setting new standards of representation in the system that determines the fate of families following allegations of child abuse or neglect.

CORPUS CHRISTI -- A former Child Protective Services supervisor faces a charge that she falsely accused a man who is instrumental in helping convict child abusers of molesting a child himself.

Grizelda Lopez-Hess was indicted Thursday on a charge of making a false report of abuse. The indictment accuses her of making a false indecency with a child report on Oct. 9 with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, under which CPS falls.

CHONGQING, China -- Nine-year-old Anna He stands quietly amid the chaos in her boarding school dorm. Anna is an outsider here.

Her parents are Chinese, but she cannot talk to her schoolmates because she grew up in America -- in foster care. When asked about the Bakers, Anna pulls away. She rolls onto her back. She covers her face with her hands. She says she has forgotten what it was like when she moved from one family to the other, and whether she was happy or sad.

Jim and Anne Cook, longtime Sturgis residents have raised six children and been foster parents to more than 70 children in the last 36 years.

35 years ago, foster parents were counseled not to attach to the children in their care. She knew even then that was bad advice and said it "broke her heart." "Attachment - holding, responding - is what makes human beings," she said. "Studies have shown that if we leave babies to 'cry it out,' their cortisol response is the same as if they had been stung by a jellyfish."

A Miami-Dade circuit judge Tuesday declared Florida's 30-year-old ban on gay adoption unconstitutional, allowing a North Miami man to adopt two foster kids he has raised since 2004.

In a 53-page order that sets the stage for what could become a constitutional showdown, Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman permitted 47-year-old Frank Gill to adopt the 4- and 8-year-old boys he and his partner have raised since just before Christmas four years ago. A child abuse investigator had asked Gill to care for the boys temporarily; they were never able to return to their birth parents.

Attorneys reached an agreement Tuesday over a teen girl's refusal to divulge the whereabouts of her 5-month-old baby to the state's Child Protective Services agency.

The agreement, which is under seal, headed off what could have been a messy conflict between the girl, a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and 51st District Judge Barbara Walther, who had ordered her to answer questions about the location of her child.

The Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children conducted a study showing that about 28 percent of Pennsylvania children in foster care have been in the system for more than 17 months.

The group would like to see that number reduced. Joan Benso, partnership president and CEO, said the goal is to get children back to their original families if possible. They don't want to see children kept in foster care for more than 17 months unless there are extenuating circumstances.

Boes and seven other behavioral health-care providers and children's advocates say Nebraska, if it wants to help families in crisis, needs to shorten the lines to existing services and provide new doorways to new programs.

They say such families - similar to the 27 who dropped off children at hospitals before the state narrowed its safe-haven law - number in the thousands. Most of the experts interviewed expect to be named to a blue-ribbon group that will advise the Nebraska Legislature's newly created Children in Crisis Task Force. That task force, announced Thursday, has vowed to design legislation in the next month to solve the problems made evident by the safe-haven cases.

Baby P's happy smile masked months of pain and terror inflicted by his mother and stepfather. He was used as a punchbag by the sadistic thug who trained him 'like a dog' - the child instinctively put his head to the floor when the brute approached.

The baby's cot and bedroom walls were stained with his blood. He weighed as little as a child five months younger and had been inflicting pain on himself by headbutting walls and floors. His fingernails were pinched - and possibly ripped by pliers - until they fell off.

A recent study criticizing Indiana for removing endangered children and placing them in foster homes at a higher rate than the national average places a welcome spotlight on child welfare.

The National Coalition for Child Protection reported that in 2007, Indiana moved children into foster care at a rate of 4.86 per 1,000 children, about 23 percent above the national average. The increase coincides with a phenomenal increase of 800 child welfare caseworkers Gov. Mitch Daniels hired after creating a separate Department of Child Services division headed by former Marion County Judge James W. Payne.

There were furious exchanges in the Commons this afternoon as David Cameron and the Prime Minister clashed over the death of Baby P.

By Daily Mail Reporter Last updated at 7:55 PM on 12th November 2008 There were furious exchanges in the Commons this afternoon as David Cameron and the Prime Minister clashed over the death of Baby P. The child, who was on the child protection register, died in a blood-spattered cot last year after spending much of his short life being used as a punchbag.

THE NSW Department of Community Services regularly places children in homes it has never seen, with foster parents its own army of welfare workers has never met.

The business of providing foster care is worth more than $600 million a year in NSW alone. Some agencies, such as Life Without Barriers, which was established by lawyers and businessmen in the Hunter Valley in the late 1990s, last year received tens of millions of dollars in funding from DOCS.

In the past five years, nearly 1000 children in Arkansas' foster care system reached the age of 18 without ever being adopted to a permanent family.

Faced with this problem of trying to find homes for the estimated 3000 kids currently in the foster care system, the Arkansas voters decided to make it more difficult for these children to ever find loving homes. Unable to write a law outright stating that just homosexuals cannot adopt, as that would easily get contested in court, Arkansas passed the Unmarried Couple Adoption Ban.

OMAHA, Neb. -- Anthony Ray liked to play Game Boy and eat Chinese food. He was a straight-A student who, on the surface, seemed to have everything he needed. Though he never fulfilled a wish he carried in his heart: He wanted to be adopted.

On Saturday night, Ray was shot to death on the couch of his foster mother's home at 37th and Bedford streets. Police arrested a 12-year-old boy for the homicide. Ray's life was not that of a carefree teenager. He was a child of the system since he was 3.

Anthony Ray didn't live long enough to receive what might have been his best Christmas gift. His foster mother had decided to adopt him.

Instead, a gunshot killed the 15-year-old - the last in a lifetime of injustices. Anthony, who had lived in foster care most of his life, was the youngest person in Omaha this year to die from gun violence. But that sad milestone was overshadowed by shock that a 12-year-old boy was arrested as his suspected shooter.

Child abuse and neglect had a price tag of more than $9 million last year in Lubbock County alone. And it affected 1,439 boys and girls - that authorities know of - in the community.

Lubbock County has a higher child abuse and neglect rate than most cities in Texas - 22.7 children per 1,000 compared to a statewide average rate of 11.2, according to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.

Participants will discuss local concerns, issues and visions related to foster care and will switch tables every 25 minutes to increase interaction. Muffins, pastries, fruit and beverages will be provided. RSVP

From grave, abused girl inspires man, Five months ago, a little girl reached out from the grave and grabbed a stranger by the heart.

Child Protective Services had long since lost track of them, and their school showed an appalling lack of curiosity as to why one sister was showing up with black eyes while the other suddenly disappeared. They surfaced a year ago this week, when Trenay was found dead on her bedroom floor and her sister was found cowering in the bathtub, covered in bruises and burns and other injuries.

Tens of thousands of children in foster care nationwide grow older each year waiting to be adopted, yet a government agency has found that there are far more women seeking to adopt children than there are children awaiting adoption.

So why aren't the laws of supply and demand working in U.S. adoptions? There are three primary sources of "supply" for adoption -- newborns, foreign-born children and children in foster care. The first two groups are small and shrinking.